Wireless Sensor Network Infrastructure: Construction and Evaluation

Large area wireless sensor deployments rely on multi-hop communication. Efficient packet transmission and virtual topologies, which structure sensor networks, are two main features for efficient energy management in wireless sensor networks. This paper aims to present a distributed and low-cost topology construction algorithm for wireless sensor networks, addressing the following issues: large-scale, random network deployment, energy efficiency and small overhead. We propose structuring nodes in zones, meant to reduce the global view of the network to a local one. This zone-based architecture is the infrastructure used by our hierarchical routing protocol. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has low overhead and is scalable.